Gender, Nature and Culture (May 20-22, 2010)

The 4th Christina conference explores the complex connections among gender, nature and culture. Recent research has increasingly viewed nature and culture as inherently entangled and inseparable, suggesting that nature is often understood through discourses of gender and, conversely, that gender is made sense of through historically contingent assumptions about nature. Building on this growing body of scholarship, the conference asks how this mutual intertwining of nature, culture and gender has been theorized, represented and experienced in the past as well as the present. The conference aims to be a meeting point for researchers from different disciplines. The conference is organized by the research project “Representing and Sensing Nature, Landscape and Gender” (Academy of Finland) and Gender Studies, University of Helsinki.

The conference has three thematic foci:
•We explore how advances in genomics, evolutionary biology and other fields of science have refashioned cultural discourses of gender, and how cultural representations of gender and nature have changed the ways in which scientific projects are formulated or popularized.
•We ask how works of art (in visual arts, literature, film, etc.) have imagined and rethought gendered assumptions implicit in the conceptual distinction between nature and culture that has been so prominent in Western culture.
•We focus on everyday experiences and the ways in which daily practices reinforce or challenge cultural assumptions about the connection between gender and nature.

While addressing these issues, we also explore how assumptions about gender, nature and culture take shape through discourses of sexuality, ethnicity and other intersecting categories of difference.

The Organizing Committee is pleased to invite abstracts for individual 20-minute presentations. Research groups can also suggest sessions of several papers. Abstracts should not exceed 300 words. Abstracts should be submitted using the online submission form available on the conference website (www.helsinki.fi/kristiina-instituutti/conference). The deadline for submissions is December 15, 2009.